W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) (Outside of Time and Space)

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W.G. Sebald (1944-2001)

(Outside of Time and Space)

Some of you, looking at the pictures which here and there illustrate my story, may think that I have stolen this idea, the
melancholic photograph, which encapsulates the preceding text and departs
from it at the same time, like an Aufhebung, the synthetic term of a dialectical movement, from the German writer
W.G. Sebald, who illustrated (if that is the right word) his books with
photographs.

How, you are asking, can I think that, by setting photographs alongside
the text of this Commentary, I will do anything more than Sebald already
did? How can I hope that I will do nearly as much? Listen, this is my
answer to you: I don’t hope that at all. Of course, I am stealing,
and so what? Those of you who guessed my game a page ago aren’t
harmed by it. Those of you who don’t know W.G. Sebald’s work
might, on the basis of my frank acknowledgment that his use of the photographic
image is canonical, pentaxical, and also nikonical, be tempted to take
a look at one of his books, The
Emigrants, maybe.

I will go farther. Wouldn’t Sebald be disappointed if he thought (if
he hadn’t died in a car accident, in 2001) that no one had imitated
him? I think he would rather know that his photograph-and-text way of
working, which he must have developed carefully over a long period of
time (unless he stole it from someone else?), had become a widely used
technique. So it was among the painters, once. Chiaroscuro, modelling
by means of shadows, was invented by monks, illuminating manuscripts.
Soon everyone was doing it: Rafael, Tintoretto, Ugo da Carpi, Caravaggio,
who had the nerve to rename it tenebrism—as if he had invented it
himself. At least I haven’t called my technique anything: photomelancholism,
for example. I leave that to someone else: one of you, maybe, you critics,
you.